1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an ink jet image forming apparatus capable of recording with no margin at sheet edges by recording up to positions extending beyond the sheet edges.
2. Description of Related Art
Referring to FIG. 9 to FIG. 11, a recording apparatus of the prior art is described. An inkjet image forming apparatus has been conventionally known having a structure capable of non-margin recording by providing an opening on a conveyance surface of a platen 100 for holding the sheet at an image forming position, forming a recess 101 made of vertical surfaces and a bottom surface below the opening, and providing an ink absorbing material (hereinafter referred to as “platen ink absorbing material”) 102 at the recess 101, and the specific structure thereof is disclosed in JP-A-2000-118,058.
With such an inkjet image forming apparatus, because the platen ink absorbing material 102 is held by vertical four side walls and the bottom surface, if ink droplets are discharged as to exceed a permissive ink amount of the platen ink absorbing material 102, the ink may flow out of the platen ink absorbing material 102 and over the sheet conveyance surface of the platen 100 and may stain the sheet.
To solve this problem, as shown in FIG. 11, a structure has been known in which the ink overflowing from the platen ink absorbing material 102 is prevented from flowing over the sheet conveyance surface of the platen 100 by arranging an ink absorbing material (hereinafter referred to as “connecting ink absorbing material”) for transmitting to an ink absorbing material (hereinafter referred to as “ink absorbing material”) for receiving ink discarded during an absorption recovery operation of the ink discharging nozzles in the recording head or a preliminary ink discharging operation.
With the above structure, however, the costs are inevitably increased because the connecting ink absorbing material is required at right and left ends of the respective sheet sizes to correspond to the different sheet sizes.